The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 23, 2004
Filed:
Feb. 18, 2000
Stephen R. Undy, Ft Collins, CO (US);
Donald Charles Soltis, Jr., Fort Collins, CO (US);
Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P., Houston, TX (US);
Abstract
An apparatus for and a method of ensuring that a non-speculative instruction is not fetched into an execution pipeline, where the non-speculative instruction, if fetched, may cause a cache miss that causes potentially catastrophic speculative processing, e.g., speculative transfer of data from an I/O device. When a non-speculative instruction is scheduled for a fetch into the pipeline, a translation lookaside buffer (TLB) miss is made to occur, e.g., by preventing the lowest level TLB from storing any page table entry (PTE) associated with any of the non-speculative instructions. The TLB miss prevents the occurrence of any cache miss, and causes a micro-fault to be injected into the pipeline. The micro-fault includes an address corresponding to the subject non-speculative instruction, and when it reaches the end of the pipeline, causes a redirect of instruction flow of the pipeline to the address, and thus the non-speculative instruction is fetched and executed in a non-speculative manner.